“It’s exhausting, especially as you get older, but I know I have to,” says another. “It does help with opportunities and how I’m perceived.”

Even the industry’s harshest critics are impervious to its pull: Mohamed’s routine feels overwhelming, but she still does it. Tilghman recently tagged her hairstylist in a post showing off fresh blonde highlights. The Aesthetica launch party offered free Dysport injections. The Substance director Coralie Fargeat said she would take The Substance if she could.

Aesthetic inflation is matched by actual inflation, of course, and individual hardships might shift where and how consumers spend on beauty in the near future. “The average price of premium products increased by nearly 9 per cent in the past year alone,” notes Mohamed. “I don’t think beauty enthusiasts will necessarily abandon their routines, but I think we’ll see more people becoming even more strategic about their spending.”

Devard predicts a focus on “extreme beauty treatments” (lasers, face lifts) and appointment services (nails, lashes). “Being high maintenance to stay low maintenance is going to continue,” she says, “people will stick with the things that make them feel good” – a low bar for brands to clear when everything else feels so bad.

Beauty is pain, the saying goes, but a more accurate analysis might be that pain powers beauty. When the world feels unstable, unsurvivable, out of control, people try to control what they can: their faces.

*A note on our images

We created all lead images in this series using OpenAI GPT-4o’s image generation tool. To do that, we leveraged the ongoing partnership between Condé Nast and OpenAI and generated images that best reflect the expert insights and predictions about appearance found in this collection of articles.

We are aware of the debate surrounding the ethics of artificial intelligence in image-making, and we share concerns regarding creative ownership as well as that of our own image. In this series, we are talking about a world that doesn’t yet exist, and as AI is in so many ways the tool of the future, we felt it was appropriate to experiment with it in this way.

We guided the visuals entirely through written prompts. No external images or copyrighted materials were uploaded or referenced – every image was created from scratch based on our team’s original concepts.

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